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DRC OKs Exemptions For New Wal-Mart

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By KEVIN WIATROWSKI, The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 9, 2007

ELFERS - Wal-Mart won approval Thursday for its newest Pasco County superstore nearly six months after county officials last considered plans for the plaza at the southwest corner of State Road 54 and Grand Boulevard.

But the approval didn't come without a fight.

Wal-Mart opponents continued to protest the company's plans for the 208,000-square-foot store. They urged Development Review Committee members to force Wal-Mart to build a smaller store turned 90 degrees to face Grand Boulevard to reduce potential traffic conflicts.

"They have stores that size," said Cynthia Besio, who lives in the neighboring Colonial Hills subdivision. "They already have the footprints made. There's no reason they can't build it."

Opponents also protested plans to put the store's main entrance at the southeast corner of the 27-acre site.

That entrance will have a traffic light to let drivers leaving the store turn left to reach S.R. 54. The signal location fell 20 feet short of the county's preferred distance to S.R. 54.

That meant the DRC had to give the developers an exemption to county rules.

Wal-Mart officials said the signal would keep shoppers from being forced to turn right out of the store, crowding Grand Boulevard and Moog Road as they tried to get back to U.S. 19 or other major roads. County engineers agreed.

However, shoppers will share the southern entrance with trucks delivering goods to the store and with utility vehicles serving the nearby county water treatment plant. That traffic pattern, opponents argued, is a recipe for disaster.

The design will create a bottleneck and make for dangerous traffic patterns within the parking lot, said Schuyler Ellis, spokesman for a St. Petersburg-based Wal-Mart Alliance for Reform Now.

DRC members granted Wal-Mart the exemption for a traffic light and also for an entrance off S.R. 54 just west of Grand Boulevard, despite the possibility for conflict with the entrance to a dentist's office next to the Wal-Mart site.

That second exemption also drew a complaint from Ellis.

"This is a self-imposed burden by Wal-Mart," Ellis said.

Wal-Mart attorney Glenn Smith said the burden was created by the amount of traffic on roads around the site.

The Department of Transportation still must agree with plans for access from S.R. 54.

Wal-Mart also had its supporters, who praised the company for its charitable work.

DRC members initially approved Wal-Mart's plans in December.

After months of protest by Colonial Hills residents, who worried the project would flood them with storm runoff and traffic, county commissioners this summer turned the project back to DRC for further review.

Reporter Kevin Wiatrowski can be reached at (813) 948-4201 or kwiatrowski@tampatrib.com.

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